The Conservatives unveiled plans for a radical shake-up of A-levels that will involve a return to traditional exams taken at the end of two years of study.

The party would move away from the modular system of assessing learning in bite-sized chunks and students sitting AS-levels after the first year of sixth form.

It would also consult universities about whether to demand that all prospective students sit an American-style universal admissions test.

A Tory administration would abandon league tables based on the current benchmark of how many pupils gain five A* to C grades at GCSE including English and maths, which they say encourages teachers to focus on pupils at the C/D borderline, while neglecting the lowest and highest performers.

Instead, they would take the number of people who gained GCSEs in English and maths as their main measure of success.

The shadow schools secretary, Michael Gove, outlined the plans as he published an independent review by Sir Richard Sykes into the future of qualifications and assessment. It concluded that A-levels were failing to provide universities with a reliable means of comparing students, or indicate how much they knew and understood about their subject.

Gove wants universities and academics to be responsible for deciding the content of A-levels. He said that while modular options will be available, the move would be towards a more rigorous system where candidates studied for two years and sat all exams at the end of that period.

"We have to look at whether we're equipping state school students with the best exams to compete fairly with independent school counterparts," he said.

The Tories would also stop vocational qualifications such as Btecs being ranked as worth a certain number of GCSEs for the process of creating league tables, which they say leads to schools pushing pupils into such options inappropriately, purely to boost their ratings

"We need to ensure children pursue qualifications because of their intrinsic value, not because they help schools to game the system," Gove said.

Sykes's review recommended that a Conservative government consult universities to see if they wanted students to take a standardised university admissions test, similar to the American Sat, to be taken as well as A-levels. It would measure language, maths and reasoning.

Also yesterday, the National Union of Teachers and the National Association of Head Teachers said they were confident that their members in England would frustrate plans for national tests for 11-year-olds after the election.

Some 600,000 children are expected to sit maths and English tests, formerly known as Sats, in May.

Teachers' trade unions who say the tests should be scrapped are balloting school heads and deputies.

The two unions have asked teachers whether they would agree to "frustrate the administration" of the tests, saying they create meaningless school league tables which unfairly stigmatise schools with the most challenging pupils.

Pupils and teachers would still attend school if a boycott went ahead, but children would not be entered for the tests.

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